Strangely, I've been having success with using Elastic Audio on drums in PT10.3.7 lately. I tried it for some quick-and-dirty editing on prepro drum tracks for some songs that were tracked without a click, and it absolutely worked, to my great surprise. It wasn't exactly perfect, but in the mix, it was difficult to pick out any artifacts. The basic workflow was like this: 1. Set all tracks to tick-based. 2. Enable EA in Rhythmic mode on the kick, snare and tom mics. Enable EA in Polyphonic on the hat, ride, overhead and room mics. 3. Delete all analysis trigger points on the hat, ride, overhead and room mics. Clean up analysis trigger points in the kick, snare and tom tracks so that you're left with trigger points only on the hits you're going to be moving. This isn't necessary, but it does make life a LOT easier, considering you cannot see the grid when in Warp mode in EA. 4. Go into Warp view, making sure that all of your drum tracks are grouped (same as editing in Beat Detective or manually), and add a warp marker to the beginning and the end of the tracks (TRACKS MUST BE GROUPED!!) so that moving a hit doesn't totally fuck the timing to hell and back. The placement of these warp markers doesn't matter a whole lot, but I like to place them directly on the grid at the beginning of a measure. That may just be a bit of my anal-retentiveness coming through, though. 5. Align by hand. This is one of the most important parts, I've found. Using the event quantize menu can seem fast, but every time I use it, the phase coherence between the mics starts to go. I'm not sure why, but aligning each marker by hand seems to yield better results. Of course, you can also dial in the feel much better this way. 6. Now for the last, very important step. If you don't do this, kiss any chance of phase coherence goodbye. Do this individually for each track: Select the audio clip, right click, and select Elastic Properties. Next to Event Sensitivity, click "Reset." It will give you a warning that it may move markers, etc. It will not screw up what you've done, so just select OK and move on to the next clip. You must do this for each track individually. The reason for this last step is this: If there are zero analysis markers in the track, the edit points will not render correctly, they'll be all over the place, timing-wise. By placing the analysis markers back into the track, you're giving EA something to render against, if that makes sense. Now, usually, with a track like a bass or guitar DI or a vocal, these unused analysis markers would create audible artifacts in anything but XForm mode, but due to the nature of a drumkit, these artifacts seem to be nearly gone. At least to my ears. Now you can render each track. I usually like to Alt-drag the clips to new tracks, and hide/make inactive the edit tracks, so that I can go back and tweak the edit if I need to. Make sure these new tracks are tick-based. I'm not sure how much of an impact this has, but better safe than sorry. Of course, a well-played track edited via slip will almost always sound better, but for those projects where you're under a time crunch, or for prepro tracks...or tracks where the drummer was insanely off, this may be the way to go. It's about as fast as BD, maybe a bit faster if you're locking straight to the grid, and it'd definitely faster than regular old slip-style editing. If I can remember to do it, I'll edit up a clip via slip and EA tomorrow during some down time and post clips. Knowing how finicky EA can be, I fully expect this to work consistently with great results......Right up until the moment you have to do something important with it. Prepro tracks no one will ever hear?Sure, no prob! Actual album production? Lemme just fuck that phase up for you! Sorry for the long post, gents. I've been cooped up with the flu the past few days, so my mind's a'spinning! Hope this helps some of you guys.
